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Ed Brill
Vice President
IBM
IBM is a global technology and innovation company headquartered in Armonk,
NY. It is the largest technology and consulting employer in the world, with more
than 400,000 employees serving clients in 170 countries.
Business challenge
To support innovation and offer
integrated mail and collaboration
experiences as it became a cloud
platform company, IBM aimed to
transition all employees to IBM®
Verse™ quickly and non-disruptively.
Transformation
IBM delivered a cloud-based
collaboration platform for its 500,000
users in just nine months—saving
millions of dollars per year, nurturing
innovation and shortening time to
market for new services.
IBM
Delivering cloud
collaboration with IBM Verse
to 500,000 users in just
nine months
“Our new collaboration
environment makes it even
easier for our people to
drive business outcomes.”
Ed Brill
Vice President
IBM
Business benefits:
Up to 5,000
mail boxes moved to the
cloud per day
500,000 users
onboarded within just
nine months
Unlocks
innovation across
the business
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Moving at the speed
of business
In today’s digital economy, people work
anytime, anywhere, and make informed
decisions faster than ever based on real-
time information. And as more enterprises
achieve digital transformation, analytics-
driven insights are becoming the crucial
differentiator to deliver compelling
customer-facing services.
“Enabling your people to work together
effectively is a crucial source of
competitive advantage,” says Ed Brill,
Vice President, IBM. “In fact, we know that
inventors at IBM are 120 percent more
likely to generate new ideas if they’re
active on our internal social networks”.
“We are always looking for ways to
empower our people to work more
effectively. The ongoing Mac@IBM
initiative has already replaced more
than 130,000 PCs—reducing the time
users need to spend with our support
teams and freeing up more time to focus
on value-added work. Similarly, the
partnership between IBM and Box is
making it even easier for our people to
share information securely.”
He continues: “Against the backdrop
of these transformation projects, we
wanted to create a single, centralized
collaboration platform to support the
entire global business—giving our
people a space to share, collaborate and
generate ideas. This meant transitioning
away from our previous approach,
which involved multiple on-premises
email servers, and mailboxes with tight
storage limits.”
Setting the bar high
To achieve its goals, IBM set an ambitious
target: to migrate each of its 500,000
employees and contractors to a cognitive
collaboration platform based on IBM
Verse and IBM Connections™ Cloud—
and all within a strict deadline.
“The new generation of IBM employees
are digital natives, who are accustomed
to using web services and mobile apps
to get things done,” explains Ed Brill.
“To drive productivity and encourage
innovation, we wanted to provide all IBM
employees with the benefits of leading-
edge collaboration tools, including instant
messaging, enhanced search, meetings,
communities, online document editing
and more.
“Better still, by hosting the solution
in the cloud, we knew that we would
substantially reduce the administration
costs associated with on-premises
mail servers. As IBM continues its
transformation to a cloud platform
company, we knew that our own user
community would become one of our
strongest references for clients preparing
to move to the cloud.
“We set ourselves the challenge of
completing the work within just nine
months—an unprecedented timeline for
one of the world’s largest enterprise email
conversions.”
Engaging the
community
To move 500,000 users to a new
platform in a matter of months, IBM
realized that it would have to develop a
new methodology, supported wherever
possible by automated processes.
Lauren Maxwell, Storyteller, Social
Transformation at IBM, takes up the
story: “Behind the scenes, we knew that
it would be essential to invest in both
people and technology to sustain fast-
paced conversion processes.
Lauren Maxwell, Storyteller,
Social Transformation, IBM
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“At the front-end, our objective was
to make the process as quick and
straightforward as possible for our users.
In addition to reducing the potential for
disruption to the day-to-day running
of the business, our focus on the user
journey was vital to ensure that our
methodology would function at speed
and scale.”
As a first step, the IBM project team
collated all of the technical documentation
required for the mailbox conversion
process, and distilled the information
down to the essential, high-level actions
required for users to reconfigure their
desktop and mobile clients after the
cloud transfer.
“From the outset, our approach to
communications was visual, simple and
user-friendly,” says Lauren Maxwell.
“Simply making the process of moving to
the new collaboration platform painless
wasn’t enough—we wanted users to
enjoy the experience, and get them
informed, engaged and excited about the
new capabilities that the platform would
offer them.
“To achieve that goal, we completely
reworked our helpdesk articles with
the perspective of the user in mind, and
created a social support hub to act as
the focus of all of our communications
with the global IBM business throughout
the process. The social support hub was
critical both for real-time support during
the conversion process, and for ongoing
engagement going forward.”
Preparing for
launch
Early in the process, the project team sent
out a message to every IBM employee
explaining the goals of the project, and
inviting people to sign up for early access
to the new IBM Verse solution.
“The response we received to our initial
message was phenomenal; in just one
week, 40,000 people signed up to join the
new platform early to help us with testing
and development,” says Ed Brill. “At IBM,
we have the philosophy ‘unite to get
things done’, and that’s exactly what our
user community mobilized to accomplish.
“Working together with IBM experts from
around the world, we were able to identify
and solve technical and user-experience
challenges ahead of time—helping us to
move seamlessly to the cloud.”
Using transfer solutions built into the IBM
Collaboration platform, the project team
began migrating mailboxes in order of
priority at high velocity.
“When we first started the conversion
in earnest, we were moving around 750
mailboxes per week,” recalls Ed Brill.
“Thanks to agile iteration early in the
process and the combined insight of
thousands of early adopters throughout
IBM, we were able to ramp up to more
than 25,000 mailbox transfers per week
with virtually no defects. When you
consider that the industry average for
this type of project is only around 1,500
mailboxes per day, we were delighted with
the cadence of our cloud conversion.”
Delivering
collaboration in the
cloud
Thanks to its automated processes, IBM
moved more than 500,000 end-users to
IBM Verse in just nine months—offering
employees across the global business
access to leading-edge cognitive
collaboration tools.
“One of the keys to the success of this
project was constantly asking ourselves:
‘how can we make this journey easier
for the user?’” says Lauren Maxwell.
“For example, when we were initially
documenting the mailbox conversion
process, we came up with 11 separate
steps. By opening up the discussion to
our user community, we were able to
uncover ways to shrink the process down
to just four steps—a reduction of 63
percent. In fact, one of our countries even
designed a script to automate the entire
process by clicking a single link.”
